Imangi: Cruciverbalists Rejoice!

For those who consider themselves cruciverbalists, Imangi ($2.99) is a game after your own hearts. As a user in the App Store accurately commented, Imangi is a “cross between Scrabble and a Rubik’s cube.” Through four game modes: Standard, Speed, Daily Challenge, and Friend Challenge; you’re objective is to make as many words as possible vertically and horizontally. The twist though, is that you can slide an entire row or column of tiles around to assist you in maximizing your word count and, subsequently, your score.

The game is as difficult as you want it to be, because your only goal is attaining the highest score possible. If you feel the need for an additional level of complexity beyond the four difficulty settings, you can choose to play a speed round which gives you three minutes to achieve your maximum score. And, if you sign up for an account, you can also take advantage of the two challenge modes. Friend Challenge allows you to pit your word molding skills against another person’s. Unfortunately, there is no option for a local two-player, thus your competition needs to have their own touch device with a copy of Imangi (and an account). The Daily Challenge, on the other hand, has you compete with all Imangi owners for the high score on a specified game board.
The game play is simple and the graphics are in line with the kind of game it is. The interface is about as perfect as it could be and the controls are generally responsive, with the only trouble being when you decide to complete your round and you are to double-tap a green square. Sometimes it will not register and instead of ending the round, it will un-select that tile effectively changing your word. Imangi also has support for five additional languages: German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian. One major annoyance with the game is that when you have completed a puzzle, you are forced to watch a closing animation where each individual tile not used disappears one at a time, then each bonus red square, then each word your formed is tallied up (again, one tile at time). It would be very nice to see an option to turn this off as it gets annoying even during the first-time sequence.

While a fun game, and a challenging one in its own right, if I had to compare it to Quordy, I would definitely pick Quordy over it. As a faster paced and more addictive game, Quordy feels like the better buy between the two word apps. Of course, your mileage will vary.